RE: pedal steels/ lap steels

["William Walker" <billwalker@looppool.info>]

 I have been playing lap steel in a variety of tunings for many years, and 
I
too  employ the faux pedal steel technique of reaching behind the bar and
pulling  a string sharp, that Bruce mentioned. Its pretty difficult if you
use heavy gauge strings like I prefer, so you might try this technique with
a slightly lighter set, to begin with.  Another cool technique that 
achieves
similar results involves diagonal bar placement to create suspensions. Bob
Brozman is a master at this. Try it on adjacent strings (like the 1st and
second, or the 2nd and 3rd string in a DGDGBD,OR DGDGBbD tuning).  The 
great
thing about the lap steel is you can get started so cheaply. Another cool
moderately priced one is the Chandler, however, be wise and pay more for 
the
humbucking pickup model, as the single model sounded a bit shrill and 
noisy,
particularly for the signal processing freaks amongst us that deal with
accumulated signal path  and gain stage noise. A Few years ago I bought a
chambered body  lap steel made by Bill Asher, a Ben Harper Model. These are
expensive these days and I got it relatively cheap, but this is an amazing
sounding guitar for the serious player who perhaps has owned good vintage
laps (Ricky, National, Fender) but found them to unreliable and finicky for
live playing. Like every instrument I own, I had to sell some other
instrument to be able to afford it. hey Kim, is this off topic enough for
you? he he
Bill